"It
doesn't take more than second-grade arithmetic to under-stand
what's happen-ing. In the U.S., an assembly-line worker is
likely to earn, depending on her length of employment, between
$3.10 and $5 an hour. In many Third World countries, a woman
doing the same work will earn $3 to $5 a day."

Some people owe their lives to the medical profession;
I owe it my feminist consciousness. I might have
said I was a feminist before 1970, which is when
I became pregnant and developed a long-term relationship
with one of New York City's outpatient clinics,
but secretly I was a premature "postfeminist,"
convinced that sexism was a problem chiefly for
the oversensitive and underassertive. But six
months of prenatal "care," capped off with a hair-raising
labor (induced at 11 p.m. by a doctor who wanted
to go home), cured all that. When the whole experience
was over, there were two more feminists in the
world-the other one being my daughter.

When I think of the beginnings of the women's
health movement, I think, above all, of the stories
women told. Stories, like my own, of humiliation
and helplessness: for example, of being diagnosed
as "difficult" for asking questions or "neurotic"
for possessing a symptom for which the doctors
did not yet have a disease. Stories of terrible
insult: like that of the teenage black woman who
had been subjected to a dozen serial pelvic exams
for teaching purposes because she was a "charity
case." Stories of unbearable loss: like that of
a Missouri woman who told me she had been sterilized,
at her doctor's discretion, just after delivering
her first baby-stillborn. And some stories told
in the third person, because the protagonists
had not survived to tell them: stories of wombs
perforated by unsafe-actually, experimental-IUDs;
stories of sleazy back-alley abortionists who
left women hemorrhaging or fatally infected.

The stories had always been there, but it took
the Women's Movement to break down the barriers
of secrecy and shame that had kept us from telling
them. I remember the relief in the room when a
group of women, meeting in the old Cleveland Women's
Liberation Center, discovered that every one of
us had been told, at one time or another, that
her uterus was undersized, misshapen, or misplaced.
How could every woman's body be somehow abnormal
and pathological? And I remember our excitement
at hearing that a group of women in Boston were
studying the medical literature by themselves
to prepare a feminist guide to women's health
(this became Our Bodies, Ourselves). That two
Los Angeles women, Carol Downer and Lorraine Rothman,
had taught themselves to do cervical self examinations
(Downer soon founded the first Feminist Women's
Health Center). That a group of Chicago women
collectively called "Jane" had set up an underground,
but scrupulously safe, abortion service that would
operate until abortion was legal. It began to
seem possible that, with enough organizing, studying,
and-especially-sharing, we might just achieve
"the right to control our own bodies."

To an extent that I find almost awesome in retrospect,
we did succeed. We created women-run health centers
where there were no "patients," only participants.
We learned to lobby the FDA and take drug companies
to court. We produced our own generation of feminist
experts-women like Barbara Seaman, coauthor of
Women and the Crisis in Sex Hormones; Helen Rodriguez-Trias,
a leading activist against sterilization abuse;
Doris Haire, an early critic of conventional childbirth
practices. A group whose names should strike fear
in the hearts of the self proclaimed "M.D.-eities,"
as someone aptly labeled them. And through all
these efforts, we engendered a minor cultural
revolution: detailed information on women's health
issues is no longer a kind of contraband, spread
through the underground press or by word of mouth.
Abortion is not only legal, but it is understood
by most Americans to be a morally valid choice.
Fitness and physical strength are no longer seen
as exclusively masculine, and women's sports are
moving into the mainstream of American culture.
Perhaps most important, the women's health movement
legitimized the notion that we have the right
to know and to decide about procedures-from sterilization
to hormone treatments-that affect our bodies and
our lives. As a disconcerted male doctor observed
in the American Medical Association's newsletter
in 1974, when the movement was just beginning
to have a national impact, "Even my docile patients
are asking questions."

But for most of our successes, there has been
a bitter disappointment. No sooner had the Supreme
Court made abortion legal than the Hyde Amendment
(first passed in 1977) made it inaccessible to
millions of poor women by cutting off Medicaid
funding for this and other procedures. We had
pressured hospitals to "humanize" childbirth only
to see new technologies-particularly fetal monitoring
and the associated upsurge in cesarean sections-make
it more alienating and potentially dangerous than
ever. And we found, to our horror, that when we
succeeded in pushing a hazardous product off the
market-like high-estrogen birth-control pills
or the Dalkon Shield-the manufacturers would turn
around and "dump" it on unsuspecting women in
the Third World. For every two steps forward,
there was one long, and sickening, lurch backward.

Then, in the last four years, it seemed as if
the ground gave way beneath our feet. We had assumed
that, if sufficiently badgered and lobbied, government
would come down on our side in the fight against
private medical interests and for a more health-giving
society: a safe enough assumption to make in a
democracy, especially since previous administrations
had even talked of a "right to health care." But
the current [Reagan] Administration seems to make
another assumption: that the function of government
is military, otherwise it's every man, woman,
and child for themselves. In a short four years,
government regulatory functions-which are the
bugaboo of conservatives and also the absolute
cornerstone of health protection-were abandoned
or undermined in dozens of areas, from drug and
product safety, to occupational health and safety
and environmental protection.

The Administration has ransacked health-related
social programs to finance its unprecedented peacetime
military expansion. The list of programs that
have been sacrificed for MX missiles or "Star
Wars" weaponry includes food stamps, school lunches,
childhood immunization programs, Medicaid, and
a host of smaller programs aiding disabled children,
pregnant teenagers, victims of lead poisoning,
and others. These cutbacks, and the increasingly
desperate condition of America's poor (who are
not only disproportionately minorities, but disproportionately
women of all races), cast a grim new perspective
on feminist health priorities: how important is
it to improve the quality of the birth experience
when, for women threatened with malnutrition,
the issue is whether their babies will survive
at all? How important a target is medical sexism
when a growing number of women simply cannot afford
medical care, sexist or otherwise? Or, ultimately,
how do we weigh any issue against the nuclear
holocaust that the superpowers seem to be so busily
preparing for?

Of course, we have to do it all: protest the
insults as well as the injuries, confront the
emergencies of life in this era as well as the
gathering prospect of death. We had started, over
a decade ago, with issues that seemed intensely
personal (some said "trivial"). We discovered
that these issues were also "political,"that is,
that they involved power and required us to pool
our strength and exert our collective pressure.
Now we find that those issues which were always
"political"-war and peace, the philosophy and
direction of government-are, in their impact,
also intensely personal: health is not a concept
that ends at the boundary of the individual body.

I feel discouraged only when I think we might
drift apart-each pursuing her solitary vision
of health and letting silence, once more, fill
the space between us. The lesson of our victories,
and they are minor, is that we can win when we
work together.

In a society that seems more committed to death
than to health, sisterhood could save our lives.